Out Of Place Quotes

“Half of the time I don't know what they're talking about; their jokes seem to relate to a past that everyone but me has shared. I'm a foreigner in the world and I don't understand the language.”
― Jean Webster

“That porch is a happy-looking place, and my father - burdened, stoop-shouldered, cadaverously thin - doesn't seem to belong on it.”
― Margaret Peterson Haddix, Double Identity

“But as I stood there dressed in a cute black pants suit and white button-up shirt and heels, I felt completely out of place. Not necessarily because of the clothes, but…I just don’t belong there. I can’t put my finger on it, but that Monday and the rest of that week when I woke up, got dressed and walked into that store, something was itching the back part of my consciousness. I couldn’t hear the actual words, but it felt like: This is your life, Camryn Bennett. This is your life.”
― J.A. Redmerski, The Edge of Never

“I expect to weave through the crowd, dodging elbows and muttering "excuse me" the way I always do, but there is no need. Becoming Dauntless has made me noticable.”
― Veronica Roth, Divergent

“All that day she felt as if she were acting in a theatre with better actors than herself, and that her bad performance was spoiling the whole affair.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“You can do everything right and still feel out of place.”
― Joyce Rachelle

“She had a strong, if erroneous, conviction of her own futility, and wished she had never come out of her backwater, where nothing happened except art and literature, and where no one ever got married or succeeded in remaining engaged.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“She was a poetry book with the wrong dust jacket, shelved in the Reference section.”
― Joyce Rachelle

“I felt so ashamed with them because everything in their life was going so well and they were so sort of successful. I couldn't talk about what I wanted with them and they were always in a hurry.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“If you travel in space for three years and come back, four hundred years will have passed on Earth. I am only an armchair astronomer, but I have the odd sense that I have returned from a journey to a world where nothing quite makes sense.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper

“I definitely felt out of place at first, not unlike being lactose intolerant in Wisconsin.”
― Jared Brock, A Year of Living Prayerfully

“Mr. Tulkinghorn is always the same, speechless repository of noble confidences, so oddly out of place and yet so perfectly at home.”
― Charles Dickens, Bleak House

“Out here, where the sand is so white,
so Westernized, how could I not
sink into it
& burn with questions
like what am I doing here
I am in the wrong book
I am in the wrong era
I am not Dorothea
I am Analicia”
― Analicia Sotelo, Virgin

“Why does the twenty-first century feel like this?
Like men are talking into
their favorite phonograph
& the phonograph is me
receiving their baritone: You're so exotic
Watch out, men, says my violin
I am a Royal Bengal man-eating tiger”
― Analicia Sotelo, Virgin

“You don’t know anything about the world I come from. You…” He squeezed his eyes shut. “This… this is why I can’t stay. We’re from two different worlds, and I’ll never be able to have a normal life.”
― P.D. Atkerson, Deadlock

“Then all at once I'm crushed by sadness. Because I realised none of this is actually me or permanent or real. I don't belong here; I can't belong. It was only the alcohol that made me believe - for a brief moment - that I could.”
― Liana Liu, Shadow Girl

“He wanted to be a universal man . . . and I suppose that isn't possible now. He belongs in fifteenth-century Italy. This age doesn't suit him.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Message to the Planet

“I felt such a stranger there, like a poor lodger. One must be with one's own people.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“¨Everything I bought for that next life is on sale but I still don't fit.¨”
― K. Eltinaé, The Moral Judgement of Butterflies

“I have found myself leaning heavily on this pain. At first I tried to silence it, thinking it would go and leave me to my agitated content. That it would linger for a season, a firm reminder of the disquiet that lurks and coils below the surface of the stubbornly self-gratifying vision of our lives. Far from going, it became more clear, more precisely located, concrete, an object that occupied space within me, cockroachy, dark and intimate, emitting thick, stinking fumes that reeked of loneliness and terror. When I woke up in the morning, I groped for it, then sighed with plunging recognition as I felt it stirring inside me, alive and well.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Admiring Silence

“Arthur Less has been out of place many times in his life... He has done them all. So being in a place of utter misrule and chaos is no problem for him. In some way, that is the comfort zone of Arthur Less. He knows, in such places, where he stands.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Less Is Lost

“The unfortunate 8075 hadn't survived his assault, splintering apart, fragments of its casing skittering across the bench. The battery within had split along its plane, revealing something as out-of-place as a missile in a bathtub.”
― L. Ashley Straker, Infected Connection

“Arched pillars held up a very high ceiling that echoed with the sounds of footsteps as everyone bustled about their business. They all seemed to know exactly what to do and where to go...”
― Audrey Mackaman, A Dog in King Arthur’s Court

“I feel like a Fish Stick Outta Water”
― Kevin Kolenda

“I headed into the kitchen, a little bit zombie-like. I didn't know what I was going to cook, and I certainly wasn't hungry, but I pulled out a bowl and pie pan and a whisk, and then instinctively opened the refrigerator and grabbed eggs and cream, as well as some of the bacon and Gruyère that had been set aside for Lacey's Mornay sauce and hot brown. I fumbled around the kitchen, grabbing everything else I needed to make a quick, easy quiche, although there was a part of me that thought it was the perfect time to tackle turducken or some equally arduous and ridiculous recipe that I'd always thought would be fun to have in my repertoire.”
― Bethany Turner, Hadley Beckett's Next Dish

“Everybody winters at one time or another; some winter over and over again. Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider.
Perhaps it results from an illness or life event such as bereavement or the birth of a child; perhaps it comes from a humiliation or failure. Perhaps you’re in a period of transition and have temporary falling between two worlds. Some winterings creep upon us more slowly, accompanying the protracted death of a relationship, the gradual ratcheting up of caring responsibilities as our parents age, the drip-drip-drip of lost confidence. Some are appallingly sudden, like discovering one day that your skills are considered obsolete, the company you worked for has gone bankrupt, or your partner is in love with someone new. However it arrives, wintering is usually involuntary, lonely, and deeply painful.
Yet it’s also inevitable. We like to imagine that it’s possible for life to be one eternal summer and that we have uniquely failed to achieve that for ourselves. We dream of an equatorial habitat, forever close to the sun, an endless, unvarying high season. But life‘s not like that.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Lucien frowned at the remaining place setting at the head of the table, then at the blank, barren spot across from Nesta. 'I- shouldn't you sit at the head?'

Rhys raised an eyebrow. 'I don't care where you sit. I only care about eating something right'- he snapped his fingers- 'now.”
― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Wings and Ruin